In this workshop, students learn to see every good poem as a toolbox for the creation of a new poem. The class will read the work of Harryette Mullen, Frank Bidart and others, whose poetry serves both as models and as materia poetica to be cannibalized—mining these sources for language and postures—for the making of lyric poems.

Christopher Schmidt teaches at LaGuardia
Community College and is the author of the
poetry collection The Next in Line.